Let's start with PLO8 then, after all, the title of this blog is "Tales of a Micro PLO8 Grinder". I have been grinding alot since February. In my last post I spoke about moving to Full Tilt to grind the Rush PLO game over there. That fad lasted a few weeks. Variety is the spice of life, and to take a break from grinding the Stars PLO8 game was needed. I felt more energized, excited and generally my interest level in the game was much higher than it had been in a while. I sustained a fairly high winrate, as well as clearing the Full Tilt bonus, which was afterall the main reason for changing over in the first place. So how did I do you may ask, well the less said about the best really. I made the horrible mistake of paying more attention to the bonus clearing process than my actual game. Eventually I was 4 tabling Rush PL10, which is the equivalent of 16 tabling regular poker, and folding in a lot more spots than usual, just to get more hands in. It was just poor poker, and not play I would advise to anyone. I lost a lot of the profit I had made in the first 2 weeks and was relying on the bonus money to keep my bankroll afloat, and if you consider that I was only clearing about $10 every 3-4 days, then you can see that it wasn't very healthy. I eventually cleared the bonus after about three and a half weeks but my profit was minimal if not breakeven. The way I saw it, I had wasted 3 weeks of grinding time, in which I could have made a decent amount of profit playing my regular games. However, there were many positives to the time off. I had come out of my PLO haze refreshed and more excited about PLO8 than ever. I looked forward to grinding my favourite game hard, and more specifically, getting back to my regular stakes of PL25 and playing for what I considered a decent amount of money.
So now I was back to the PL25 6max games on Stars, and loving every moment of it. To make a long story incredibly short, between March and now I made around $400 dollars, lost pretty much all of it back, then made some of it back, told you it was short didn't I. I'm still semi-committed to grinding PLO8, but at the moment it hasn't got most of my attention. About 2 months ago, my staking agreement ended and although I was still motivated to play PLO8, I wanted to improve my NLHE game. There were many reasons for this, firstly NLHE is so widely played, that if I'm ever going to make serious money in poker, I have to be very adept in it. It's well and good having a very high level PLO8 game, but how often are you going to find a live PLO8 tournament, or even a big online tournament? Once, twice a year? Not nearly enough to make some real money. Secondly, and I think most importantly, I had never actually seriously grinded NLHE. I'd play a fair few SnGs back in the day, but never taken my game to the next level. So with this in mind, I hopped over to the staking forum on 2+2 to see if anyone was looking for some SnG grinders, and low and behold, the first application I made was sucessful. I am now part of a stable of players grinding the 180 man turbos on Stars. Not only do I benefit financially, but the stake also comes with some really useful coaching. I've probably learnt more in the past 4 weeks playing with this stable, than I knew in the whole of my NLHE playing days. For now I'm going to be focusing a lot of my attention on these games, but don't worry my faithful followers, my heart still belongs to PLO8, and come the new month, I'll be putting in enough volume to not only satisfy myself, but to get enough stories to fill the blog.
Wow, long post eh. Promise you guys the next one will be a little less tl;dr. Good luck on the tables boys and girls!
